


not the squares of the cinema, but envelopes of affection

by toujours_nigel



Category: Night Watch - Sarah Waters
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 23:22:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1567730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>someone has a chest they refuse to get looked at, and other reasons for escape</p>
            </blockquote>





	not the squares of the cinema, but envelopes of affection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [queen_ypolita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_ypolita/gifts).



> For QY, with much love.

The Stanley Spencer couple had stopped coming on Tuesdays. Kay felt oddly betrayed by it, as though her clock had stopped being able to tell the time. The neat old man came on Saturdays at eleven instead, supported by a sandy-haired boy who looked like a boxer or a dock-worker. He loitered outside the house and smoked endless cigarettes while Mr. Leonard droned on that the illness had no place in reality, but was a construct of the imagination. Mickey, dragged up to Lavender Hill under protest, struck up a friendship with him in the time it took Kay to get down the stairs, and pronounced him a capital fellow. Kay had nothing to say to that, but found herself missing the dark, fey young man who had had such a careful manner about him. They had liked to look at each other, coming and going, for a flash of recognition.

“Going soft in your dotage,” she told herself sternly. In the little mirror above the washbasin, her face looked greenly pallid. The ring knocked against the chipped porcelain. She had had to resign herself to wearing it on her thumb: it hung loose on all the other fingers and she had come very close to losing it once or twice. Going out, she could hear the sailor with the wasted arm being told that he could regrow flesh of his own will. It would be a curiously good thing if that could happen: over the months there had been a slackening in the flow of patients to Mr. Leonard’s door.

It was winter, and Kay’s room was cold even with the fire: servants could not be allowed ideas above their station. Mickey’s cough had grown alarming enough for her to relent and seek an appointment with a female doctor. Kay, dragged along because she had nothing better to do, and had been the one to push for it in the first place, thought they might as well have gone for a man. Mickey, incapable of admitting to shrinking from a woman, had submitted to the whole sorry thing with poorly-hidden distaste; they were halfway up Bramerton Street before she even noticed what they were about.

This early in the day, the place was nearly deserted. Two tables had been pushed together in one corner to accommodate a group of girls who looked barely old enough to be out on their own; in another two middle-aged women compared purchases. Ted Ware stood at the bar talking to a tall man who looked oddly familiar.

“You’re not going the same way as Binky, are you?” Mickey asked presently.

“No,” Kay said slowly. “Don’t be ridiculous. I think I’ve seen him somewhere, that’s all.” She probably had. She’d been walking London streets for three years now, ever since the end of the war made it possible. Before that she’d done the same routes in an ambulance, more often than not with Mickey at her side and bombs shrieking overhead. They’d had bets that they’d seen everyone in London.

Mickey craned her neck, sniffed dismissively. “Got a look of little Raynes about him. Now, are we going or not?”

“Have lunch at least. You’ve the afternoon off.”

“Kay,” Mickey said, fond, exasperated. “Do you really think I’m going to go into the country because that old hag thinks it’ll clear my lungs, at this time of year, _alone_?”

 

* * *

 

 

There wasn’t much to pack or put away. More than a year after she had taken up residence, the rooms at Lavender House still looked like the lumber room at a train station. With her clean clothes off the wire and neatly put away, there were no traces of her presence. The last flat had been the same. What she had told Mickey was true: her life had gone into the gravel that night. Julia had taken the heart out of her and been thanked for it.

The rheumatic Indian woman was sitting with Mr. Leonard, explaining how thinking it wasn’t there had begun to make her pain recede. Her voice had a slight strangeness to it, the trace of a different language she had abandoned for English but longed to slip back into at the gaps when she fumbled for words.

Maybe the trick was belief. If one thought something long enough and fervently enough, maybe one grew numb to the pain. There had to be something to it, or people wouldn’t keep going. So many houses had fallen. People salvaged what they could and built anew. Only Kay was at a stand-still, still struck with grief, worn down. Years ago, Gerald had shown her a lightning-struck oak, hollowed inside, rotting in place. From a distance it had looked as strong as a wall, but it crumbled at a touch, and after the next storm it had fallen.

After the war, when the men came back, women like Binky had fretted at the new-old restrictions. Kay had hardly noticed. It had been a relief to set her duty down. If she hadn’t had an income she would have had to look for a job. Some days she thought she might have starved instead. The thought of being forced to talk to strangers every day for hours a day was more repellent than the thought of starvation. She was nothing like Mickey.

Mickey, waiting for her at the door from a superstitious refusal to even chance encountering Mr. Leonard, had struck up conversation with a turbaned old man. The woman’s husband or brother. Brother, Kay rather fancied; there was a distinct similarity of looks between them, a family resemblance of great hooked noses and high cheekbones.

“He came over in the Great War,” Mickey explained, popping the trunk so Kay could set her bag in it, next to Mickey’s and mostly on top of the spare tire. “Served in the Fusiliers and then decided to try for the Bar. Fascinating old chap.” She let the lid slam down again, grinning. “Thought I was a bloke for a minute there, took him by surprise when I started talking.”

“I’m surprised he kept talking to you after that,” she said. People didn’t sometimes after they realized. They felt betrayed or something. God, she was turning into a bitter hag. “Where did you get the car?”

“It’s Sandy’s.” It was a sporty affair, and shone from the care that had been clearly showered upon it. “I covered for him two weeks last month when his daughter had the measles.”

“I remember,” Kay said. “Weekend off, _and_ the loan of his car? You shouldn’t quit this job.”

“Couldn’t if I wanted,” Mickey said, yanking the door open and settling behind the wheel. “Chauffeur’s job I interviewed for last month, well. They think if a woman’s been forced to learn how to drive she oughtn’t bloody well talk about it where decent people can hear. Damned hypocrites.”

“You have to wonder what they did in the War,” Kay said, climbing into the car.

“Screwed their eyes shut and sneered at us when they couldn’t pretend we didn’t exist.” For a minute or two Mickey was quiet, manoeuvring the car out into traffic. “I say, Kay, it’s awfully decent of you to come with me.”

“Yes, how could I possibly take time out from my very busy schedule of loitering around the city to go loaf around in the country-side? Do shut up.” She leaned back, feeling the leather give in a supple caress, moulding to the shape of her. “God, she’s lovely.”

“If it weren’t so cold I’d get the hood down and then we could really feel her go.”

“We’d freeze.” But what a good way to die. The close confinement of the car and Mickey’s quietly efficient management are the best bits of Kay’s war, devoid of the very human urgencies of it. No blood, no bodies, no bombs. Only two women in a car, navigating London streets. “I wish it could be like this forever.” She closed her eyes and felt the engine purring along luxuriously, a strange urgency in the car like it was straining to be out of the city and taken through its paces on emptier roads.

“Buy a car and employ me,” Mickey offered immediately. “And move out of that ghastly house.”

“Done.”               

“If you’re joking I’m going to shove you right out. Kay, do you mean it?”

“I think I do. One can’t keep living among the rubble forever.” She opened her eyes to Mickey’s astonished, eager face. “Eventually one has to move. Pay attention to the traffic, won’t you?”

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Eileen Myles' poem, 'For Jordana'.
> 
> At the corner of Bramerton Street and King's Road lies Gateways Club, owned by Ted Ware (who reportedly won it in a card game) at this time, and fairly popular among lesbians. In some years, after Ted married Gina, it would become exclusively a women's club; at the time this story is set (the winter of 47-48) men were still members, but were rare and often came to ogle women dancing with each other. While it isn't explicitly mentioned in _Night Watch_ , Mickey tells Kay "Or come out, some time! We could go for a drink. We could go to Chelsea. There's no-one there these days, the crowd's all changed-" which I'm assuming is a reference to Gateways.


End file.
